Metaphysics (Aristotle)

• 1. Introduction

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  Aristotle's Metaphysics is a book that has defeated some of the greatest minds in history. Avicenna, the medieval Persian philosopher, read it forty times and memorized it word for word before he could claim to understand it. He later wrote that he had despaired of himself, convinced the book was something "there is no way of understanding." What finally unlocked it for him was not another reading but a short guide written by al-Farabi, a philosopher he happened to encounter in a bookseller's quarter one afternoon. That story, told in Avicenna's own words, says something important about what this work actually is. It is not a polished treatise written for a general reader. It is dense, compressed, and possibly assembled from lecture notes. Its fourteen books cover subjects as varied as the nature of substance, the logic of contradiction, the existence of God, and the philosophy of mathematics. The questions this documentary will follow are the ones the text itself raises. What did Aristotle mean by First Philosophy? Why has a work this difficult become one of the most studied philosophical texts in history? And who, across two thousand years, actually read it?

• 2. A Title Not His Own

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  Aristotle never called this work the Metaphysics. The title came later, through an arrangement made by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC. Andronicus organized Aristotle's surviving writings into a sequence, and the collection of abstract treatises wound up placed after the Physics. In Greek, "after" is "meta," and so the collection became known as the writings "after the Physics," or Metaphysica. The debate over what that prefix actually means has run for two thousand years. Scholars such as Eduard Zeller, Werner Jaeger, and Jonathan Barnes have argued that "meta" was chosen deliberately, suggesting the subject goes beyond or above the Physics, making these writings metatheoretical in relation to it. Others, including Alexander Grant and W. D. Ross, have held that the prefix was simply a shelf marker, nothing more than a reference to physical location in the canonical order, a tradition as old as Andronicus or even the earlier scholar Hermippus of Smyrna. Aristotle's own term for the subject was different entirely. In his other surviving works, these treatises are called "the writings concerning first philosophy." That phrase points to what he actually cared about: not a body of texts, but a kind of inquiry. First philosophy, for Aristotle, was the study of being as such, the ultimate causes of all reality, which he considered superior to every other theoretical science precisely because it studied all of reality rather than a portion of it.

• 3. The Shape of the Work

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  Jonathan Barnes once described the Metaphysics as "a farrago, a hotch-potch," and his characterization captures something real. The fourteen books are referred to in manuscripts by Greek letters, from Alpha to Nu. Scholars have long been uncertain about the order in which they were written, and the arrangement that survives is the work of later editors, not Aristotle himself. In the 19th century, critics examining the wide variety of topics concluded it was a collection of shorter works thrown together haphazardly. W. D. Ross, whose edition appeared in 1924, took a more careful view. After studying the content and the cross-references within the books, he concluded that ten of the fourteen books form a more or less continuous work: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Mu, Nu, and Iota. The remaining four, he argued, were inserted into their present positions by later editors. Even so, Ross cautioned that even the ten core books do not constitute a complete work. Werner Jaeger, whose edition followed in 1957, went further, maintaining that the different books came from different periods of Aristotle's life, as if the collection were a kind of philosophical diary assembled posthumously. Everyman's Library, for their one-thousandth volume, published the Metaphysics in a rearranged order specifically designed to make it easier to read, grouping thematically related discussions rather than following the traditional scholarly sequence. The translator team for that edition was Hugh Tredennick and G. C. Armstrong.

• 4. What Is Substance?

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  Books Zeta, Eta, and Theta are generally considered the core of the Metaphysics, and Zeta opens with a question that philosophy has wrestled with ever since. "Being" has several senses, Aristotle writes, and the primary kind of being is what he calls substance, or ousia. He then considers four candidates for what substance might be: the essence of a thing, the universal, the genus a thing belongs to, and the material substrate underlying its properties. He works through each candidate and finds all of them wanting. Matter alone cannot be substance, because if you strip away every property from a thing, you are left with something that has no properties at all, and such ultimate matter cannot be what makes a thing what it is. Aristotle argues that essence is the real criterion of substantiality. The essence of something is what would appear in a full account of what that thing is by its very nature. He offers a telling example: a person is not musical by nature, but they are human by nature. Humanity is part of the definition of a person; musicality is not. Book Eta then adds details about difference and unity, and Book Theta extends the inquiry into potentiality and actuality. Potentiality, Aristotle writes, is "a principle of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other." Actuality is the completed state of something that had the potential to be completed. To illustrate the relationship, he offers an analogy: as one who is awake is to one who is asleep, so is actuality to potentiality. Where form and matter are distinctions that can be made at a fixed point in time, actuality and potentiality are distinctions that play out across time, a diachronic rather than synchronic relationship.

• 5. Logic, God, and Mathematics

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  Book Gamma defends two principles that Aristotle treats as foundational to all rational thought. The first is what we now call the principle of contradiction: it is not possible for the same proposition to be the case and not be the case at the same time. The second is what we now call the principle of excluded middle, stated in its Latin form as tertium non datur, meaning there cannot be an intermediary between contradictory statements. At the other end of the work, Book Lambda arrives at something very different: Aristotle's account of God or gods, developed through his argument for a first or unmoved mover. He calls this mover "the most divine of things observed by us" and describes its nature as "the thinking of thinking." The argument runs through a division of substance into three parts: matter, which is stationary and can be directly perceived; change, especially a positive state regarding change; and a mixture of the two. Because an infinite causal series is absurd, and because only created or destroyed things require a cause, there must be something eternal that itself requires no cause. That is the unmoved mover. Books Mu and Nu, the final two books, turn to a very different question: how numbers exist. These chapters take up the philosophy of mathematics, asking whether mathematical objects have an existence of their own or depend on something else for their being, a problem that connects back to Aristotle's critique of Plato's theory of Ideas in Book Zeta.

• 6. Two Thousand Years of Readers

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  In the 3rd century, Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote a commentary on the first five books, and a commentary on the remaining nine circulates under his name, though modern scholars doubt he wrote that second part. Themistius composed an epitome of the whole work; only the section covering Book 12 survives, preserved in a Hebrew translation. The Neoplatonists Syrianus and Asclepius of Tralles both wrote commentaries as well, and in each case they tried to reconcile Aristotle's doctrines with Neoplatonic cosmology. The Fourth Crusade, which ran from 1202 to 1204, played an unexpected role in the work's transmission to Western Europe: it facilitated the discovery and delivery of original Greek manuscripts to scholars in the West. William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of those manuscripts became the working texts for Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. William's translations were later used by modern scholars preparing Greek editions, because he had access to Greek manuscripts that have since been lost. Werner Jaeger lists William's translation in his 1962 Oxford edition of the Greek text. Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, drew on Aristotle extensively in his Guide to the Perplexed, which set out to demonstrate that Aristotelian science and Biblical revelation were compatible. The Arabic tradition reached its height with Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, whose voluminous writings on Aristotle earned him the title "The Commentator" among later generations of scholars. The work's influence extended to Dante, and its editorial history remains an open question in scholarship of the new millennium, with new critical editions of individual books still appearing.